Pitchman

Randy Johnson, the skyscraping pitcher who once threw a baseball so hard that it killed a passing bird, stopped by this magazine’s office the other day for a deskside appointment. The Big Unit, whose signature mullet had been neatly trimmed, wore a four-button suit, ducked under doorframes, and knelt to pose next to a magazine cover hanging thigh-high on a wall. The cover was from 2005, when Johnson joined the Yankees, and shows him standing on the mound, preparing to pitch. The top edge cuts off at his neck.

Johnson has been retired for three years and was in town on business—more on that in a moment—but stopped first to chat with a veteran baseball writer from his playing days, whom he found sprawled on his office floor, searching for a photograph that had fallen behind his desk. “You O.K.?” Johnson asked, before our man popped up and launched into conversation about the end of the baseball season. (Later, he described the floor-bound encounter with Johnson as “the biggest vertical distance between a scribe and an athlete ever.”) They both noted that the World Series had not gone well for the Detroit Tigers, whose ace, Justin Verlander, had pitched poorly in Game One, though there was mild disagreement between pitcher and writer on just how bad it had been: the Big Unit said that Verlander had got “roughed up”; the writer said he’d been “whupped.”

“I always thought the first game of the World Series was fun for everybody, and then they get serious,” our man said. “It always seems like a party, because everything is over—you’re starting over again.”

“Yeah,” Johnson said, adding that retirement could be fun, too. “I got a lot of other interests in life now. Four kids. And photography. I’ve been able to fall back on some things that I hadn’t had time to do because of baseball.”

“You look good.”

“Yeah! I haven’t lost much weight, just some muscle tone.”

“We miss you out there.”

“Like anything, you just gotta enjoy it while you’re doing it. I’m not wound as tight anymore. Enjoying life.”

“That’s what I try to do.”

“Pleasure seeing you.”

“Take care, Randy.”

Now to business. Johnson was in New York to promote a limited-edition luxury wristwatch called the Big Unit ($15,500), which incorporates, at his suggestion, a baseball (on the second hand) and his old uniform number (on the bezel, which marks fifty-one minutes after the hour, rather than fifty). There are only a hundred Big Units available for purchase. The Big Unit was not wearing a Big Unit: the watch on his wrist was called the Sonata ($39,000), because it plays a tune—“Ding, Ding, Ding,” Johnson sang—at a set time each day. Told that the Big Unit felt comparable, weight-wise, to a baseball, Johnson demurred and said, “I don’t know if it would kill a bird.”

The pitchman role—Ulysse Nardin, the watch company, prefers “friend of the brand”—is one prong of Johnson’s retirement-survival strategy. Post-baseball, he has devoted more time to golf, family vacations, and, especially, photography, which he practiced as a hobby throughout his playing career, sneaking out between games to take pictures in various Major League cities. (He has a shot of lower Manhattan, taken from the east side of the Brooklyn Bridge, with the Twin Towers in the background.) Today, he has found work as a rock-concert photographer: you can see his photo of members of the band Rush on the November cover of Premier Guitar.

Johnson expressed concern that many retired athletes seem to have little direction about how to spend the rest of their lives. “They don’t have anything to fall back on,” he said. “When you do something for as long as we do . . . all of a sudden you’re home all the time, so you’re kind of re-acclimating yourself with the way things are run around the house, and reintroducing yourself to your wife and kids.” On the plus side, retirement has proved less stressful than, say, pitching in New York, so Johnson does not specify the time at which his Sonata should ding. He lets it ding whenever it wants. After all, he said, before leaving the office, “I have nowhere to be.” ♦